Alcance de Costeo Estándar

Then what is identity? What is that “something” which is perhaps “in” the object as its “soul”? Identity is so hard to grasp — in fact, to identify — because it is not a thing; if it were, we would have a firm grip on it and get to know it. Identity is a referential relation which we seem to take for granted when we use a name. Identity, I would like to claim — and this again is purely my claim — is part of our logical attitude to the world.

To make this clearer I would like to point out some significant sim- ilarities in Kripke’s conception of logic and Wittgenstein’s standpoint in the Tractatus, although Kripke has often been used to repudiate Wittgen- steinian insights (eg cf Soames 2003 : 13–15). Among other things, the very term rigid designator points towards some affinity between the two posi- tions. Both Kripke and Wittgenstein seem to hold that it is logic, or, more precisely, the logical structure of language which contains some fundamen- tal, unshakeable, unalterable, unconditional truths with absolute and nec- essary certainty, yet these truths are precisely not facts of the world and not facts we “know” because in the world nothing is unalterable; in the world everything could be otherwise: everything could be true or false and thus these “absolute” truths are not part of the world. For Kripke, it seems to me, such an unalterable truth is that things and persons are identical with themselves, for Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, among other things such an absolute truth is that there is a logical structure (logical form). Wittgenstein even says that the logical structure of language and of the world cannot be talked about: it remains in the realm of the ineffable, the unsayable, the inexpressible but this does not mean that there is no logical structure as it is not the case that what cannot be talked about would be unimportant or

16 _{G´eza K´allay}

non-existent; on the contrary: it is what we hold to be most precious that lies in the domain of the ineffable. Logical structure is not something we can put into words and further analyse or interpret with language, either.11

I interpret Wittgenstein’s logical structure in the Tractatus as our very atti- tude to the world, to the world around us, it is our constant and unalterable way in which we relate to the world. To put logical structure, ie our logical relation to the world into words in order to, for example, comment on it would require another standpoint than the one we have, namely a stand- point from which we could see and scrutinise our very attitude. But this attitude is a part of us (it is a pair of irremovable spectacles everyone has on their noses, as it were): we always already relate to everything with this very attitude, we cannot get, so to speak, “before” it so that we may then comfortably compare, from the “outside”, this attitude and the world as two independent phenomena.12

I would like to interpret Kripke’s notion of identity as part of the logi- cal attitude Wittgenstein, I think, talks about: epistemologically, we do not have a hold, a firm grip on identity – I mean identity itself, the very relation that eg a person is identical with her- or himself — because we are not in a knowing relationship with it: if we express it, we express it in a tautol- ogy, leaving the whole of logical space open; identity is not something we could analyse any further because it is something with respect to which we analyse everything else. Thus, it appears to us as tautological, and, hence, as trivial but trivial things seem to be the most evident for us; they literally “go without saying”. Ontologically, however, it is an unshakeable part of our being in the sense that it is, so to speak, a part of our primary, instantaneous relation to the world, a relation we always already take for granted. Thus, identity is not “in” the things or persons but rather “in” us as part of the way we logically relate to the world. Identity can be put on display — in the form of tautologies — but cannot be further analysed and —as Wittgenstein proposes it in his “Lecture on Ethics”—we can only resort to similes and allegories to illustrate them (cf Wittgenstein 1993 : 42). 11 _{Cf “Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what} they must have in common with reality in order to be able tot represent it — logical form. I order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to be able to sta- tion ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world. ” (Tractatus, 4.12) “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What ex- presses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. (4.121) “What can be shown, cannot said” (4.1212) (emphasis throughout original).

Is identity a predicate? 17

I propose that our relation to identity (which is a relation itself) is similar to being absolutely determined or convinced about something, “somewhere deep down inside”, for example — somehow — “in our guts”, something which will never and nowhere change in us, come what may; this is why I consider rigidity in the term rigid designator such a fortunate metaphor.

I think with identity Kripke revived something very significant in phi- losophy. He revived, among other things, the Kantian insight that with lots of things we are not in a knowing relationship and the Wittgensteinian in- sight about the nature of necessary or absolute truths: that there are such truths yet they can only be necessary if they are not “reached by language” which could thematise, interpret, or analyse them because if they were, they would cease to be necessary truths, since language can only thema- tise things about which we may disagree, which can be true or false. (Let me make this clear: a tautology does not thematise, or interpret, or “anal- yse” identity; it expresses it, it puts identity on display). And, at the same time, and very curiously, these ineffable truths are the ones on which we build when we relate to the world, for example when we wish to get to know the world, when we talk, when we do anything.